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> From what I can see on the RHEL lists that have many professional admins, there's been no hue and cry, no sky falling, etc.

Dude,

I don't know about you, but I admin about 400 odd servers, we've got about 40,000 globally. I've still got RHEL 4 boxes (Soon to be decomm'ed) Only some (5 - 10) of the boxes I built last year are RHEL 6. Everything else is RHEL 5 still. It works, I've no need to go above that for our purposes.

Now, I've got some new re-purposed boxes that I've started building with RHEL 7, and I've just started dropping myself into systemd.

Changing the startup scripts of *every* vendors application out there? No commercial applications are setup for systemd, this is going to be a loooooooooooooooong drawn out process to make this work.

RHEL 7 is brand new, very few people have started using it, the customers haven't had a chance to comment on it yet.

"The mechanism that establishes computing you can trust is not any different from that which regulates a modern democratic society. It essentially rests on the right to vote, associated with access to objective information. Free/libre software, which, in a global computer base dominated by Microsoft, is gathering momentum, is the only one to follow these principles: its code is accessible to everyone and its modifications are collectively decided on by a community of developers. The installation of a backdoor by the NSA within the source code of a free program is theoretically not impossible, but it will always remain much less likely than it would be within a proprietary program, whose code is kept secret."

"That said, technical solutions have their limits. What we need is political awareness, both at the governmental level and at the individual level. This choice is going to require some efforts from each of us: proprietary software programs have for years aimed to infantilize our relationship with IT, on the assumption that the less we knew, the more we would behave like captive customers. Regaining control of one's computing is not easy, but it is an essential civic initiative. Everyone should try to give priority to free software.""Link to Original Source

Actually, looking at it further, the whole $600m was involved in that settlement.

Who cares what the conclusion was? Which way did the money go?

300m from MS to B&N.How much from B&N to MS? Zero. They did get stock though. Ultimately worth nothing if the business goes bust.

MS wouldn't have paid if they weren't screwed, no matter the terms of the deal. They might get that money back ultimately, but nobody involved would have called that a win if the patents were so strong.

Let's get one thing straight here, the only reason why Microsoft dropped $300m into the Nook business was to bury a antitrust suit by Barnes and Noble over the patents they were allegedly infringing by using Android. Fearing failure and their Android licensing business drying up, they decided to make the whole lot go away.

I want remote brick, if I lose my phone, I want it being completely useless to the next person, no firmware flash, no nothing; a paper weight. I don't want it being sold off for a tenner and sent to another country that doesn't subscribe to the block list.... Actually, you know what? I want it catch fire, I want it to be an incinerated paper weight!

Well, they were designed right back then when markets behaved the way they did. Things change. I know people on designing medical software now that wouldn't design it the same way 5 years ago.

Finance is no different. 10 years ago, you would never have considered Hadoop or anything like that, but now, large distributed systems are exactly what people are looking at instead of running batch all the time.

> I thought old, inappropriate systems at banks were common knowledge...

Only to people who work in IT / Finance, and only more recently with the failures in the UK and other places which showed how antiquated systems are.

It's more a management point of allowing what is happening to happen. "Why not push the HFT customers off to another platform so that the rest of the customers aren't impacted by them?" was more my point.

> They can add sometimes unexpected ramp-ups in data that can cause already-creaking systems to fall over

So, your systems suck.

> potentially impacting other non-HFT clients. This is partly bad management of older and less interesting systems but partly because they are an unpredictable lot.

Partly?!?!?!?!?!

Sheesh, if you can't handle ramp ups and ramp downs, your code / systems aren't designed right. Screw the HFT guys, they'll be using other people aside from yourselves to get to market when you stuff goes down / goes slow. What about your other clients? These are apparently your more profitable ones and you're letting the HFT guys break the platform they trade off?